Expert: LizaL - 4/15/2005

Question
 I was wondering if there is a special plugin I can get for photoshop which will change my images into silhouettes or do a basic conversion to black and white. Thank you.  Bob Brady.

Answer
Hi Bob,

From everything I can find, I don't think there's a silhouette plug-in for Photoshop. There is, however, one for Adobe Illustrator; not sure if you use that, but in case you do, here's the link for the plug-in:
http://www.thepowerco.com/product_1419_detailed.html

If you don't want to spend $269 for an Illustrator plug-in and would like to do this on your own in Photoshop, there's a good tutorial on creating silhouettes here:
http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tutorials/jennifer/ipod.html

Converting a color image to black and white, in Photoshop, doesn't require a plug-in. You can go to the Image pulldown menu and select Mode, and then select Grayscale from the submenu. Or you can go to the Image pulldown menu and select Adjustments, and then from the submenu select Desaturate -- which will also give you a black-and-white image.

The difference? Visually, depending on the image, it can be very subtle, and sometimes you won't see much of a difference at all. But desaturated images will often appear darker onscreen, and sometimes they even appear to lose detail.

Then again, if you desaturate an image, rather than making it grayscale, you still retain the color information. This can come in handy if you want to use the history brush and erase parts of the image so that just a portion of color appears as an accent.

That's what I did here, in this little movie. I took a color image, then desaturated it, and then I "painted" back in parts of the image with the history brush, as a special-effects example:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/history_brush.mov


Also, some people might argue that a desaturated image will print better as a CMYK file -- and I tend to agree, because a desaturated image still has the color information, and will probably have richer tones when printed.

I think the bottom line here, in creating a black-and-white image, is trial and error. But at any rate, those are two ways to do it!

Hope this helps, and please post back if you need me to clarify anything.

Lisa